During the past few years Crandall Stats and Sensors™ has worked with the engineering students at Rock Valley College. They have a program called Capstone, in this program engineering students from RVC work with local businesses to improve safety, productivity, traceability, throughput, etc. This year we worked with two groups of students and on May 3rd we visited RVC to see these students give their presentations to the local businesses and RVC professors. During the visit, Mike Crandall, President of Crandall Stats and Sensors™, was interviewed by Susan Vela. Below is an excerpt from the May 4, 2016 Rockford Register Star article. To see Susan Vela’s entire article, click on this link http://www.rrstar.com/article/20160503/NEWS/160509839.
RVC engineering students show off their end-of-the-semester capstone projects.
Today, 15 Rock Valley College students showed off their capstone projects to fellow engineering students, instructors and business owners who advised them throughout the semester.
Mike Crandall, Crandall’s president, said that he enjoys brainstorming with the students. He likes learning new buzzwords and phrases such as “smed,” which stands for single-minute exchange of die.
“Oftentimes, you start a project, and it’s a concept of one person,” Crandall said. “When you sit down and start thinking through all the different problems, all the different opportunities involved, feedback from a whole bunch of different people, you get different angles.”
Last year, RVC students improved a Crandall vacuum for making bulbs. They came up with a fixture that reduced time spent on one particular step to 15 seconds from 15 minutes.
“It’s a tremendous productivity improvement along the way,” Crandall said. “There’s a couple of safety improvements as well. It turns into something kind of neat.”
